


blood in the cut

by shaekspeares



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: Gen, Introspection, i could wax romantic for hours but i only have the time to churn something quick out, i have a lot of feelings about ambrose, those feelings are love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-08
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-08-20 20:45:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16562849
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaekspeares/pseuds/shaekspeares
Summary: A look at Ambrose, the warlock, the man, the cousin. There is more than Spellman magic in the old house down the wrong side of Greendale.





	blood in the cut

**Author's Note:**

> this show is uhh messy but its so gorgeous and i am so invested in ambrose and prudence..................

Ambrose broods.

 

Seventy five years of being house-bound will do that to you. Especially when the house is shared four-way with witches from one of the oldest devil-worshipping covens in the world. _Especially_ when your existence in the realms is of the nature of his own- a life without the easiest of beginnings, with a present like…

 

The demonic nightmare Batibat had put him through makes him shiver to think of, and he rarely shivers at anything, despite the general idea in the Spellman residence that Ambrose is a soft creature. Seventy five years in this suffocating house, in this dead town, where no one visits and no one leaves. The most excitement he’s had since his old life came to an unceremonious end was the gruesome and premature death of Edward and Diana Spellman.

 

Well, no, Sabrina.

 

Sabrina has blessed the last quarter of a century of Ambrose’s not-life with her… with her being. Ambrose is not- he’s not had the chance to _be_ , not in a while. And Sabrina, from the moment her little angry baby face crosses the threshold of the house, is determined to _be_ , and to listen to no one on how exactly she is to be.

 

Ambrose had his rebellious phase, too. His didn’t go so well.

 

He likes his little half-and-half cousin. She is vivacious and bright, headstrong enough to stand her ground against Zelda and soft-hearted in a way no witch Ambrose has ever met is. A funny creature, Sabrina, half mortal half witch. Callous like a witch, caring like a mortal. There are other ways to see it, of course, but he is fond enough to deem it a strength of hers.

 

As Sabrina grows the house does not, and she goes from a little girl Ambrose watches over and entertains to a slightly bigger girl Ambrose has more difficulty watching over but seems to entertain equally.

 

She spends much time in the mortal world. Too much, Zelda says. Ambrose privately agrees just a little, though for different reasons. Sabrina is not prepared for what is to come- being yanked back decisively into their world, having come into contact with so little of it.

 

In the end she gets another choice. Sabrina runs to the house bloody and afraid, and Ambrose bluffs the shit out of an entire coven, and the next thing he knows, somehow she out-lawyers the Dark Lord. Ambrose admires her her luck, truly. He could do with some himself.

 

Yes, Ambrose broods. Sabrina is out more often than in, especially once she starts attending the Academy, and her snippets, harrowing though they may seem to her, make Ambrose yearn for his studies. It’s not the same, working alone on the same old spells. That out there is his world, not the glimpses of mortals he gets in the mortuary. A world of darkness and magic and untapped potential- his own.

 

He misses his first time, at Oxford, misses the people, misses the stories. He misses living.

 

Ambrose’s situation in the house has always been a sore point for the family. Sorer in the early days. Sabrina’s only seen it at its mellowest. Hence her frustrations- little dark brows furrowed and child’s voice demanding why Ambrose always made himself scarce, never did more than roll an eye and walk out of the room.

 

It’s not all bad, of course. Zelda is a devout, set in her ways bitch, but she’s willing to help with his learning, at least. Hilda, of course, could get along with anyone, and Ambrose and she have their laughs, mainly at Zelda’s expense. She’s a sweet witch, and a talented one. He’d like her reading skills, to be able to take one hard look at someone and know them inside out. But she and Zelda have a messy, push-and-pull sisterhood spanning far past his life, and it’s hard to exist in that bubble, especially before Sabrina, especially after Edward meets Diana.

 

He and Sabrina don’t talk much about her parents. She is curiously uncurious about them, at times. As a child she interrogates her aunties a lot; later only on a whim, when some thought sticks to her mind.

 

Ambrose thinks he knows Sabrina so well in part because he knew her parents.

 

Diana intrigues him, back in the day, but he sees little of her. She doesn’t enjoy coming to the house, before her death. Which he can’t blame her for. But he’s always found mortals so odd, so compelling. In his university days he’d met so many- cared, he thinks. He doesn’t always believe his own memory.

 

They die fast, mortals. Back then, young and full of bravado, he’d known it only abstractly. Then his young, beautiful, brave friends had grown up, grown old- and he’d had to vanish from their lives, lest they question his lack of ageing. Letters had replaced conversations, and so ridiculously quickly those had vanished too- different letters had reached him, somber, inviting him to funerals.

 

Sabrina’s not the only one who’s toyed with bringing mortals back to life. Ambrose was never an idealist, though. He’s more warlock than she will ever be witch, though she may well prove to be a _better_ witch than anyone, in the long run.

 

Anyways he sees no mortals alive, in the house. Only grieving families, and bodies. He’s fond of the bodies; they keep him company, he fixes them up, makes them look pretty. Poor little mortals, with their soft bodies and soft souls.

 

Satan, he misses having friends. Real ones, not corpses or resentful aunties. The closest thing he has to one with Sabrina in and out of school is Salem- there's a bit of misplaced longing, with the little salamander he keeps. But the last friends he had were those whose names he just cannot bring himself to betray. He rather tries not to think about them. Otherwise, he starts to think about how easy it would be even now to just confess, to be free, to regain his life, his freedom, to get out of Greendale and never fucking come back.

 

Oh, he would flee the continent, if he could. This covent is not his covent. Sabrina may be the one breaking walls down one dainty step at a time, but Ambrose’s no traditionalist either. He’s got no qualms being without principles.

 

Some days it’s intolerable. He has tried to get off the property, of course. Waking up on the kitchen table with Hilda and Zelda perched over him and his limbs fried dissuaded him soon enough. Magical barriers are no small feat to cross.

 

No, these days in his gloomy moods he internalises. Locks himself into the attic and wrecks everything within reach until he’s got nothing left in him, then masochistically fixes it all, fragment by fragment. He thinks each time they lose a little of their realness, a little structure. He does too, he supposes.

 

Seventy five years. That’s a mortal lifetime, seventy five years. Sabrina’s Kinkle boy’s father was a baby the first time Ambrose came across the name in the papers. (Never in person, of course. The Kinkles took care of their dead elsewhere, back then.) Sabrina’s pastor daughter friend has a grandmother about that age.

 

The mortal world has rearranged itself completely in the time Ambrose has been cooped away. He wishes desperately he possessed the gusto and freedom to do the same.

 

Sabrina, bless her heart, is still well within the mortal timeframe. Perhaps will be permanently- none of them, for all they like to pretend, know what will happen to Sabrina with time. Not the coven, not the High Priest, not (Ambrose suspects) the Dark Lord himself. Half-witches aren’t a commodity.

 

Sometimes he wishes he was like her, to feel a little of both, to know the other side. Their worlds are so strictly divergent, and for what? Witches and mortals, Dark Lords and False Gods… All two tired sides of the same old coin. Their story nowadays is that they are too good for mortal things, but once upon a time the mortals were the ones hunting them, as everyone is quick to recall. None of it is consistent, is the point.

 

Not that he thinks they’re the same, exactly. He’s not a lunatic. Simply by virtue of lifespans they are different- see the world differently, understand life differently. And magic, the magic he breathes, is incomprehensible through a mortal lens. Not to mention their priorities are so skewed.

 

It’s what makes Sabrina so odd. So _wrong_. He loves her to bits, but there is an unmistakable wrongness about her- an off feeling, a sense of disquiet. Sometimes Ambrose stops mid-way to touching her because he feels it, the pulse of something unnatural. He loves her too deeply to ponder it, but he dwells on it once in a while. She is wrong to mortals in ways they cannot place, knowing and entertained and caring little about their specific ways, but so too she is wrong to witches, wrong by blood but also by the way her eyes see them, the fearless disregard she has for traditions sunken into their bones.

 

Ambrose is rusty, meeting students from the Academy. His bones are out of practice. The drowning feeling that comes from the writhing witches in his room makes his blood pound like heavy bass, not so much the physicality but the togetherness, the belonging.

 

Luke is his escape. Luke is his opportunity, his change, his salvation- he drinks him in and basks in him. He leaves the Spellman house through Luke. His spirits are unbearably high, but his bones ache with warning.

 

He is too often prey to his aching solitude. Rationally he knows this is his weakness- knows that the wanting of his heart has only ever lead him to damnation. But he is a slave to feeling, now more than ever, to being real, to existing in a moment. So Luke he loves, because he is want and freedom and rightness, and a handsome boy to boot.

 

Still, in his bones, he feels danger. They know these things again, out of the house.

 

Ambrose does not brood. He has no time for it. He is alive, and belongs, and there are murmurs he cannot ignore that tell him to be quick. His life never lasts.

 

Ambrose does not brood, but in the nights his heart beats so loud he thinks he might die, and he fights off nightmares of other hearts and other deaths.

 

Ambrose does not brood.

 

**Author's Note:**

> @CAOS give us ambrose plots that aren't just him getting off with Obvious Evil Plot Device lukas you absolute morons...


End file.
